We assess whether and how differences in productive public expenditure impacts on industrial location. Since productive public expenditure and taxation affect in opposite direction industrial location, it is not straightforward that following an increase in productive public expenditure in a...

By providing a long run reconstruction of regional Net Fiscal Flows (NFFs) in Italy throughout the last six decades (1951-2010), this paper documents the substantial rise of fiscal transfers to Mezzogiorno (i.e. Southern Italy) from the rest of the country. Besides, three further arguments are...

This paper focuses on the perspective role of Mutual Loan-Guarantee Consortia (MLGC) in mitigating credit constraints for SMEs located in the Italian Mezzogiorno. First, we argue how the functioning of MLGC fits into the theory of bank-firm relationships, also referring to the scarce empirical...

Abstract: In this paper we assess the relevance of both knowledge creation and diffusion processes in affecting Italian SMEs’ propensity to innovate. In doing so a knowledge production function (KPF) is estimated for a representative sample of small and medium manufacturing firms over the...

The New Economic Geography (NEG) literature has paid little attention to the role of the banking industry in affecting where firms decide to locate their business. Within the framework of the NEG, this paper aims to fill this gap by studying the impact of the degree of regional financial...

This paper deals with the influence of different types of government expenditure on growth. It widens that proposed by the literature which follows the lines set by Barro (1990) because it adds the changes working through the demand side, generated by the variations in the distribution of the...

We introduce public expenditure (PE) in a general post Keynesian framework characterized by a nonlinear investment function. Our aims are: 1) to provide a systematic analysis of the impact of PE (‘productive’ or ‘non productive’) and of the Government sector size on economic growth,...